1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a wireless communication system, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for power control and load balancing based on load estimation of a neighbor cell in a wireless communication system.
2. Description of the Related Art
A communication system for portable phones has conventionally employed a cellular scheme of dividing a service area into areas (cells) of a restricted range, deploying Base Stations (BSs) respectively, and performing communication with terminals within the cell. A 2nd-Generation (2G) mobile communication system based on the Frequency Division Multiple Access/Time Division Multiple Access (FDMA/TDMA) technology is employed in a method of changing a frequency allocated by a cell in order to prevent interference of a signal of a neighbor cell. Regarding this, in a 3rd-Generation (3G) mobile communication system based on the Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) technology, the use of the same frequency was made possible even in a neighbor cell by interference resistance obtained by spectrum diffusion. The demand for higher-speed data communication is being expected in a 4th-Generation (4G) mobile communication system, and the use of the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) technology enabling high-speed data transmission using a broadband signal in a mobile communication environment is expected.
A cellular wireless communication system supports handover to support the mobility of terminals. When there is an increase of a load of a specific cell among a plurality of cells, the cellular wireless communication system performs load balancing for reducing a load of a corresponding cell. The cellular wireless communication system performs power control for maximizing BS capacity.
However, the conventional load balancing concept is for decreasing the load of the cell when there is a load increase within a specific cell, and cannot reduce the number of loaded terminals (hereinafter overload terminals) per cell from the overall system standpoint.
Therefore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for power control and load balancing for minimizing the sum of squares of the number of overload terminals per cell based on load estimation of a neighbor cell in a wireless communication system.